First Impressions: LittleBigPlanet‘s Ever-Expanding World of Wonder

Sometimes, creating a game can be more fun than playing one.

LittleBigPlanet, one of this year’s most highly anticipated PlayStation 3 titles, lets players create their own levels, then share them online. For budding game designers, it’ll be an intuitive way to bring their imaginations to life without needing to know how to write a single line of code. And for players, it’s TheNeverending Story of videogames, constantly updated with free new content that’s been created by an army of amateurs.

For me, LittleBigPlanet brings back strong memories of a game called ZZT. The first product ever released by Gears of War-maker Epic Games, this 1991 PC game is more than a historical footnote to me: I sunk hundreds of hours of my middle school life into creating my own game levels in ZZT.

Why? There were game-creation tools before ZZT, and plenty after. But ZZT was attractive and user-friendly because it seamlessly blended game design and play. Creating a custom game with Epic’s engine wasn’t an arduous, laborious task — it was fun, just like playing a good game. The editing interface was nearly identical to the game’s, and you could quickly start messing around with the basic parts to see where your imagination took you.

LittleBigPlanet, which is currently in beta testing, comes as close to replicating ZZT‘s seamless blend of playing and creating as any modern game I’ve seen. Instead of using ANSI text to substitute for graphics, as with the ZZT,LittleBigPlanet lets you make a world full of real-looking toys. And even with the beta’s limited tool set and small player base, gamers are already diving in and creating clever levels at a lightning-fast pace.

LittleBigPlanet is a big part of Sony’s strategy for PlayStation 3, because the company’s competitors have nothing like it. Sony announced the game in March 2007 as a relatively small-scale, downloadable title, but after the public reacted quite favorably to the idea — and PS3 started taking a massive beating in sales — Sony delayed the game by a year and fleshed it out into a flagship Blu-ray disc release.

It’s difficult to resist drawing comparisons to Will Wright’s much-ballyhooed evolution game, Spore. But LittleBigPlanet is only similar to Maxis’ recent release insofar as they are both built to harness the power of user-generated content.

Spore now features millions of 3-D creatures, buildings, etc., built by players. LittleBigPlanet doesn’t give players as many options in that regard — because you can’t create elaborate 3-D characters, everything you make is going to have the game’s building-blocks look to it.

But no matter what elaborately creative buildings and creatures you choose to incorporate into Spore, the gameplay does not change. With LittleBigPlanet, you can change the game itself. You can make it more (or less) fun. It’s user-generated content aimed at hard-core gamers, not Sims fans.

The full version of LittleBigPlanet, which Sony will ship to stores October 21, will include a complete single-player mode, with levels designed by developer Media Molecule. The first batch of these is included in the beta version, and players have to finish them all, learning the ins and outs of how to play, before they can start creating their own levels.

That doesn’t take long — there’s not much to learn.

Playing LittleBigPlanet is extremely simple: Your character, Sackboy, can run, jump and grab things. That’s it. A typical level might have you clambering over stairs, winding your way through a maze, jumping over precariously placed fire pits or deadly spikes, or swinging on a string, using momentum to cross a chasm — kind of like Prince of Persia, only starring an adorable stuffed toy.

There are a few additional wrinkles here and there, like stickers you can place on objects to trigger switches, or a jetpack that lets you fly in a small area, but by and large, it’s a platforming game pared down to its barest essence. And it has to be. Players need to understand intuitively exactly what Sackboy’s limitations are. Otherwise, how can they be expected to design a level around them?

LittleBigPlanet gives gamers a wide variety of building materials, textures and interactive objects to use to form their levels. But you don’t need to delve too deeply into all the minutiae to start building.

When you enter the editor, it looks exactly like the game itself: You’re running Sackboy around a massive empty plane. At this point, going through a couple of brief tutorial segments will let you know how to build 3-D objects just by "painting" them in two dimensions with your cursor. Armed with this knowledge, you could easily put together a basic set of obstacles for a player to try jumping over.

If you want to start adding more complicated stuff, you can make elevators that work when a button is pressed, or build "creatures" that can be made of any piece of material that has wheels and a "brain," just as long as you remember to stick all the items together.

I get the feeling that LittleBigPlanet tries to anticipate what you’re attempting — there’s a whole lot going on behind the scenes to make the whole process as hassle-free as possible.

This is not to say that level creation is totally idiot-proof. I’ve read a lot of message board posts from people who’ve had their carefully constructed levels collapse on them because they weren’t paying close enough attention to the game’s real-world physics. You can suspend these while you’re editing, but the advice from the other creators seems to be: Constantly flip gravity back on and make sure everything holds up. You can rewind your steps, but if your structure is fatally flawed to begin with, that won’t help unless you fix the underlying issues.

LittleBigPlanet is a bit difficult to navigate, however. The available levels are separated into "pages," each of which has a mix of popular and new levels, to keep you apprised of the best and the latest additions. But relocating a specific level that you found once can be difficult. There’s a text search function, but it doesn’t work: I was looking for a level with the word "Burninating" in the title and it didn’t come up.

You can "Heart" levels and add them to your list of favorites, and your online friends can browse these lists. But the final version of LittleBigPlanet needs to have a better way to browse and search through all available content, not just the few bits that bubble up to the top and appear in the menu.

In spite of my youth spent building ZZT games, I doubt I’m going to actually build any amazing levels in LittleBigPlanet. Simply going through the tutorials was enough to tell me I don’t have time to do this. You can, however, build levels with four players at once, which I want to try as soon as possible — you know, division of labor and all that.

LittleBigPlanet could still be incredibly enticing for non-creators, because it offers us the allure of an ever-growing, unlimited, crowdsourced world full of new levels that are churned out for free on a constant basis.

It is, without question, fun to play. But without the constant addition of new content, it wouldn’t be half the game it is now. So the LittleBigQuestion is: Will LittleBigPlanet‘s gameplay limitations give it a shelf life longer than that of the average game? After the new-game smell wears off, will all the levels that users create just be endless iterations of the same basic mechanics?

Or will Sony’s incipient army of player-designers actually come up with designs that transcend the game’s limitations, creating an endless assortment of new games that are worth playing, and all constantly delivered to our PlayStation 3s for free?

That’s a question we won’t really be able to answer until a few months after LittleBigPlanet‘s release.